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evolgen | February 13, 2006One of my favorite non-Science Blogs science bloggers has moved over to Science Blogs. If you don't know Orac, go check out his new site for a little Respectful Insolence.
evolgen | February 12, 2006Do you know of any sporting event, besides the Olympics, that is not shown live? This is not 1975. We have the internet and 24 hour sports news channels -- you can't turn on the TV, surf the net, or walk out your front door without hearing the results of any of the major events. Even though NBC has multiple networks telecasting the games, they still insist on showing almost anything anyone would be interested in watching on a ridiculous tape delay. If ESPN/ABC had the rights, everything would be available live on ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNEWS, ESPNU, and ESPN Classic, with all of the major events…
evolgen | February 9, 2006The first ever edition of the Animalcules blog carnival has been posted at Aetiology. Go read about those wee little things that you can't see with you naked eye.
evolgen | February 3, 2006If you read this site through a newsreader, I have an (important) announcement for you. There are two site feeds available: an RSS feed and an Atom feed. If you would like to receive the full site feed, subscribe to the Atom feed. If you would rather subscribe to partial entries (only the first few paragraphs of a post), use the RSS feed.
evolgen | February 2, 2006What is the 'string theory' of your field?
Following the success of Chad's last two memes I've decided to pose my own question. From the outside, it looks like string theory is a legitimate research area that is controversial amongst non-string-theorists. It appears to be misunderstood or unappreciated. Some physicists (yeah, I hate the way I phrased that . . . I'm sorry) do not think there is anything worth learning from string theory. Just to clarify, intelligent design is not the string theory of evolutionary biology -- no one takes it seriously. Maybe something like evolutionary…
evolgen | February 1, 2006
Tangled Bank Polytechnic Institute has released the course catalogue for the spring semester. Go check it out. By the way, we need to come up with a shorter name for our beloved alma mater. Here are some suggestions:
TBPI
TB Tech . . . um, the connotations with TB may not be good for recruitment
Tangled Tech
TBank Tech
Tank Tech
Vote in the comments
evolgen | January 31, 2006This blog doesn't seem to want to write itself. I've got a few posts in the pipeline (including the next on detecting natural selection), but I can't seem to finish them. I'm in this writing funk where I start to lay some words onto paper (well, text editor, actually), and then I can't organize all my thoughts or just can't finish writing the post (do I have an undiagnosed case of ADD?).
Luckily for me, I have Chad at Uncertain Principles to inspire me, as he's already done once before. This time he's asking people about their least favorite misconception in their field. One commentor…
evolgen | January 29, 2006I am a big fan of The Science Creative Quarterly. I especially like how they integrate science with humor -- sort of like the Onion, but focused on science. Now they are getting into science education.
If you know nothing about phylogenetics and systematics, this introduction to phylogenetics from the SCQ will be quite informative. Of course, if you're reading evolgen, you probably know something about phylogenetics -- and if you don't, read it and evolgen will make more sense.
The treatment of phylogenetics isn't wrong, it's just not quite right. Take, for example, their distinction…
evolgen | January 27, 2006I may not be the oldest of the ScienceBlogs cohort (that's an understatement, by the way), but I do remember the Challenger disaster. I don't remember watching it on TV. I don't remember seeing the explosion on the news. I don't think I even knew what news was or how I could watch it. I was in kindergarten. Among the few things I remember from that first year of school were wetting my pants and hearing that a spaceship exploded and a teacher was on board. I didn't realize that there were other teachers besides mine. I knew my teacher was not dead, and this confused me. This is among…
evolgen | January 20, 2006Just don't let Elaine draw in your eyebrows.
The New York Times has an article profiling the advertising side of ScienceBlogs (you know, the thing that allows Seed to provide us with bandwidth so that we can spew our ivory tower propaganda far and wide). Anyway, they refer to the type of people who like to read about science in their spare time as "Leonardos". And all this time I thought we were just dorks, dweebs, and nerds -- but not geeks (they bite the heads off of live chickens). To learn more about your bad-ass-Renaissance-man selves, check out the Seed guide to Leonardos.
I also…
evolgen | January 18, 2006Everyone else it advertising it, I might as well:
Tangled Bank #45 has been posted at GreyThumb. Nothing else to see here, move along . . .
evolgen | January 15, 2006I'm still getting used to the Movable Type interface that ScienceBlogs is using (it's a bit different than Blogger), and some of the changes may be noticible to you, my readers. For one, I've been dividing my posts into the "Entry Body" (which you can read on the evolgen front page) and the "Extended Entry" (which you must click "Read on" in order to see). I am doing this so that the front page is not filled up with a particularly long entry, and it's easier to scan for an individual entry. The drawback of this is that only the Entry Body makes it into the RSS feed, which means you can no…
evolgen | January 14, 2006I previously remarked that I would be posting my series "Detecting Natural Selection" over at the old site. Well, as the title of this post indicates, I changed my mind. The newest installment of "Detecting Natural Selection" has been posted at ScienceBlogs.
evolgen | January 11, 2006Hello again to my long time evolgen readers, and nice to meet you to the first timers who have found the new site.
For my regular readers, this, for all intents and purposes, is the new evolgen. The old site is still around and will act as an archive of my previous evolgen posts, but if you happen to visit it you will notice some changes. It is now known as "Clash, Culture and Science" and this new incarnation of evolgen at ScienceBlogs will act as the new CONVERGENCE OF EVOLUTION AND GENETICS. Read my "farewell post" for more details.
As for my new readers that have discovered me via…